The Pebble in the Pond

People Fell Apart after 6 Weeks of Lockdown in 2020

It was 3am on Saturday March 14th 2020 when I arrived at the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge border crossing into New York State. The border officer leaned into my car and asked me why I was travelling. My daughter’s University in Boston had closed all the dorms on the 12th and expected students to be out by the 16th. I did a 19 hour round-trip from Toronto-Boston-Toronto. We were the only people wearing masks as we went into a service centre in New York State. When we arrived at the Canadian border at 9pm, the officer had on a mask and surgical gloves, and informed us we had to quarantine for 14 days. This is how the pandemic started for me.

In his 2nd season of the BBC Podcast Things Fell Apart, journalist Jon Ronson focuses on a series of events that all happened within days after the first 6 weeks of lockdown. Each episode starts with an origin story that he posits are the pebble that creates a ripple effect that links to the event in 2020. In this season, he also adds that in each precipitating event there is an untruth that has devastating effects.

It’s incredible to think it’s been 4 years. Forget ripples, the waves still wash over us today with more culture war turmoil. I’m not sure we have enough distance from 2020 yet to be able to see it with any perspective. So you may argue with Ronson on some of these stories. I have to give him credit, I would rather chew tinfoil than go back to 2020, but his storytelling and following a lead draws you in.

This wasn’t intended on being a review of things to listen to, but I might as well keep the theme going. Recently I have been listening to interviews and transcribing words and images into my sketchbook, to inspire ideas about meaning making. One interview I loved was Gary Oldman talking about acting. He was asked about his approach to preparing for a role, “It’s not memorizing lines, it’s forgetting every thing else.” A beautiful way to describe being present in a process. I will probably use this in drawing class this week as we continue our 3rd week using a prompt to draw from. The prompt is the character we are trying to build on the paper but a lot of noise intervenes, like how it looks is more important than what it says. A good drawing never says ‘look at me, I’m good at this.’

Capidolts

More unintended things here. I had been working on some ideas for a drawing book and wanted to describe the problem of ‘scale to detail’. This is a problem that plagues a lot of art students. They focus on a more complex area —the hands—-and lose the big picture and the hands become small. I used Trump because it was also funny because he does have small hands. Then January 6th happened and small hand Trump found a different use.